Deal In Walker Spy Case Sends Wrong Message -- Loud And Clear

November 3, 1985|By Howard Means of The Sentinel Staff

WASHINGTON — Navy Secretary John Lehman is wrong. The plea-bargaining arrangement worked out between government prosecutors and the spy John Walker does not continue ''a tradition in the Justice Department of treating espionage as just another white-collar crime.'' In the current climate at the Justice Department -- where large fines are much preferred to criminal indictments in white- collar cases -- the Walker spies, father and son, have been subjected to harshness itself.

Does that justify the deal that gives John Walker a life sentence and his son, the spy Michael Walker, a 25-year one? Hardly. Lehman might have some of the detail work wrong, but he's absolutely right to be appalled.

Two separate but related matters are at stake here, it seems to me. The first is the nature of the crime itself.

Espionage can be the final result of complex motivations. Among them is the belief that the government you are serving is more right or just than the government you are committing treason against. But neither John nor Michael Walker raises any of the fine points of human behavior that make the novels of John Le Carre, Charles McCarry and the spy ones of Graham Greene such a pleasure to read.

Michael Walker did it because he didn't have the courage -- the guts -- to say no to his old man. ''I was shocked and afraid at what my dad was suggesting,'' he said in his signed confession. ''I knew what he was suggesting was illegal.''

John Walker's decision to provide the Soviets with vital coding information wasn't undertaken out of any tangle of ideology or any confusion of loyalties, however twisted. According to the daughter who fingered him, John Walker did it for the money and because he enjoyed the intrigue.

''I'm sure it wasn't all enjoyable,'' Laura Walker Snyder said of her father's spying, after the sentencing deal was cut. ''There was a lot of pressure and stress, but overall he enjoyed the intrigue, the mystery, the fact that he was pulling something off.''

The simplicity of motivation and the special vileness of the crime -- John Walker's purloined documents may well have cost the lives of American soldiers in Vietnam and almost certainly would have had disastrous results in any large U.S.-Soviet military confrontation -- gets to the second issue.

''The fact is that this outcome will probably result in as much of a sentence as John Walker could have gotten. Plus it enables his testimony to be used in other cases, and it enables us to obtain more information . . . on just exactly what information was passed,'' a Defense Department spokesman said in explaining Caspar Weinberger's support for the Justice Department on the Walker deal.

Fine. I'm no lawyer or judge. Maybe life with parole eligibility in 10 years is the most John Walker could have been hit with. Maybe his testimony is necessary to get a conviction on his supposed compatriot, the accused spy Jerry Alfred Whitworth. Maybe Walker's cooperation is necessary to trace the damage his crime has done.

But I am a parent, and I know that just about the hardest thing to teach children is that actions do have consequences.

John and Michael Walker acted -- in full knowledge of the law, against the vital interests of their nation, absent any confused loyalties -- and those actions ought to have direct and dire consequences: consequences unencumbered by concern for subsequent prosecutions, consequences undiminished by the need to trace and control the damage.

The government might save an encrypting machine or two by the deal it cut with John Walker; it might get Jerry Whitworth behind bars; but when any government starts teaching the lesson that even the consequences of the most odious acts are subject to a whole myriad of considerations, it has lost a very important war.

The Walker deal, Navy Secretary Lehman said, sends ''the wrong message to the nation and to the fleet.'' He's right, and it sends the message loud and clear.